Elements 12 stops working after 2 to 5 minutes

I recently upgraded from Photoshop elements 8 to elements 12. When I start Photoshop elements 12 and load my translated catalog, Photoshop Elements 12 stops working after two to five minutes. I am running elements 12 version 12.1.0.0. I am running Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 on a Dell desktop with a i7 CPU. I am running Java version 7.0.510 and Microsoft NET Framework 4.5.1. This same behavior (photoshop stops working after a few minutes) occurs on my Dell laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium. My digital photo catalog contains approximately 9400 items in 459 folders (all still photos) for a total of approximately 30 GB. Please advise me on a solution.

I get a Windows message pop-up saying "Photoshop Elements has stopped running. Windows is checking for a solution to the problem". After a while, the message updates to say "This program will be closed". I click OK and the application closes. Yes, I installed the 12.1 update. This does NOT happen if I load a small test catalog. I tried going back to Photoshop Elements 8 and "repairing" the original catalog, even though Elements 8 said the catalog was good and didn't need "repairing". Then I re-translated the Elements 8 catalog for Elements 12. It still fails after a few minutes of operation when the big catalog is loaded.

I just installed Elements 12 on my 64 bit Windows 7 machine and have the same problem. It didn't happen the first few days. During that initial period I tried doing a catalog backup to a large and empty external drive, and the backup stopped working at 83% complete. It actually hung up the entire computer. I had already reconnected missing files, performed a repair (even though nothing needed repairing) and optimized the catalog. The same thing happened using another external drive. Then yesterday, while trying to debug that problem, Elements 12 started to give the same message as above, that Elements had stopped working and would shut down. I uninstalled the software and reinstalled it, and the same problem occurs. I should also mention for completeness, that when I originally launched the program, and performed the catalog conversion, it wouldn't launch. I had read someone's suggestion to disable facial recognition, by changing the file breezsession.dat to breezesession.old. That did work, and I could launch the program, but then the other two problems shown above occurred. Any suggestions?

Is this catalog from an older version? Where is the backup stored?
How many media files are there?

Can you please try launching Organizer keeping Shift key pressed and create a new catalog. Let us see if the issue is with installation and if yes, whether the new catalog works fine. Post this test, we may work ahead with your older backup and try to make it work.
Appreciate your help here.

I launched Elements 12 Organizer with the shift key pressed and created a new (empty) catalog. It did not crash at all. I added one .NEF file and it still did not crash. I then opened the old catalog and it did crash. The catalog was converted from Elements 8 to Elements 12. Elements 8 still exists on my computer. The Elements 12 backup that I tried to create is stored on a new 1.5TB external Seagate drive with well over 1 TB free. I also tried backing up on a 750 GB La Cie drive with 358 GB free. The backup stopped working on both drives at 82% or 83% complete. There are a total of 40,149 photos in the catalog, consisting of .NEF, .JPEG, .TIF, .PSD, and .PDF files. There are no movies or audio files in the catalog. Here is some system information:

Thanks for the details Leonard.
It does appear that the restore process is failing due to some files. If you have Elements 8 on the same machine as Elements 12, can you please try converting instead of restoring your older catalog? For this, launch Elements 12 Organizer and click File > Manage Catalogs > Convert > Choose E8 catalog and hit convert. If you are unable to see your catalog by default, click "Show previously converted catalogs" or "Find More Catalogs" options.

The Elements 8 catalog was originally converted (not restored) when I first launched Elements 12 (after the facial recognition problem was solved). Elements 12 prompted me to do the conversion. When I followed your instructions above and tried to convert again, it said that the Elements 8 catalog was already converted and then renamed the old file. I tried again to convert using the new file name and it told me it was already converted and renamed it again.

Thanks for the update Leonard. Can you please go to your catalog's location on your machine (by default it is C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Elements Organizer\Catalogs), and check for thumbs.5.cache file within the catalog folder.
Please rename this file once to say thumbs.5.cache.old and launch Organizer 12. If the crash still happens, we would need your catalog db file to see the cause of crash at our end. I shall share with you a Dropbox folder wherein you may upload the db file for our investigation.

Let me start with the thumbs.5.cache experiment. I added on .old and relaunched Elements 12. It took several hours to regenerate the thumbnail images and it did not crash during that time. It also did not crash after it had completed the thumbnails. So I thought the problem was solved. To be sure, I closed Elements and relaunched it, and it crashed withing a couple of minutes. So I will try to gather the files that you asked for and put them in a dropbox folder. I will try to do that either tonight or tomorrow.

I added the three files to the dropbox. I had a problem with the PSE8 .tly file in the backup folder. It resided on my smaller La Cie drive, and I had to delete the backup to make room for the PSE12 backup (the one that did not complete). So I went to an older drive and found the PSE8 .tly file which I added to the dropbox, but that file is from 9/25/12 and doesn't include any photos taken since then. But I didn't take a huge number of photos since then, so it includes a large majority of photos.

Hi Leonard,
I am unable to reproduce this issue. Here is what I did:
1. I opened your E12 catalog file and left the system idle for around 45 minutes. After that I did scroll up/down and the catalog was functional. I even tried to take backup of your catalog which went smooth till the second screen (then I quit the workflow).
2. I converted your E8 catalog to E12. Though it took some time but it also opened file in E12.
Am I missing something here?

Also as you said when you open your catalog, after around five minutes, a message is shown saying 'PSE12 has stopped working'. If that is so, please create registry entry as shown in image attached in this comment. Once done, next time if Organizer crashes, a dump file will get created at C:\Dumpstore. Please send this dump file to us (using the same drop box link) along with 'Core version' and 'Language version' information from 'Help->system Info' from Elements Organizer's help menu.
Please let me know if you face any issues in collecting/sending logs.

Before I do the registry operation, let me first give you an update. I ran a check disk on my hard drive two days ago and it found one bad sector and said it repaired a photo that is in my Elements catalog. The file name is DSC_1191.NEF. So I deleted that file from the PSE8 catalog. I then wanted to reconvert that PSE8 catalog to PSE12 and start fresh, but it doesn't give me that option from within PSE12. That catalog does not show up as one of the choices, I guess because I had previously converted it (I checked the box to show previous conversions, but it only lets me open up the already converted catalog. So I opened it and deleted the file from there, and within two minutes PSE12 had the old problem and had to shut down, just like before. Is there a way for me to get the conversion to work so I can get a fresh start? Do I have to first delete the PSE12 catalog before trying the conversion again?